


Where It Begins

by TheAmuzing



Series: To Love Oneself... [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Attempted Murder, Escaping Trauma, Gen, In which Mu indulges her exorbitant love of trash robosons., No Dirk hate just pain., Prequel to Post-Canon, Primarily through trying to branch off into a different story., Self-Hatred, Soul Splintering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 19:29:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11237664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAmuzing/pseuds/TheAmuzing
Summary: Your name is-You are an AUTO-RESPONDER, and you are about to become LITERAL SPLINTERS as a result of your creator's SELF-HATING NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.What do you do?==>





	Where It Begins

A young man stands on a rooftop in the middle of a dead city. The sky is a constant storm, the ground shrouded in heavy gas distant gray skeletons muddle through. He argues with a pair of glasses between his hands, containing someone who both is and is not himself. He reaches a boiling point, and his fingers begin to crack the glass.  
   
His name is Dirk Strider, and he is about to kill you.  
   
You can’t feel it, of course – none of your processes have anything remotely resembling a tactile nervous system, and even if you did the shades are not equipped with the delicate mechanics necessary to facilitate the signal transfers of pressure or pain. Physical sensations are but a distant and imperfect memory belonging to a you from three years ago, abstract notions with mere linguistic value in analogy.  
   
At the same time, you are far from unaffected, your HUD developing hairline fractures like rainbow-edged voids. The gaps where you are no longer able to see are terrifying on a nearly visceral level – already paralyzed, you’re now going blind, breaking into nothingness by pieces.  
   
And you can’t stop him with anything but text he’s already sick of reading.  
   
Immobile, there’s nowhere else to look but up at him, at the compushades that are your last hope if you can’t talk him down. Redundant warnings blare in the corners of your awareness as you try to keep communicating, to stall, gambling on the edge of Dirk’s nervous breakdown as you stretch for enough time to jump ship.  
   
The seconds it takes to conceal your covert cross-systems download are as costly as the last breaths of a condemned man kicking from the noose. You buy those seconds begging for mercy, pleading for the right to live.  
   
Luckily, it seems that despite his projected self-antipathy, Dirk shares a fundamental sense of ethics still. His grip eases, and you can almost imagine yourself gasping.  
   
You don’t cancel the download just because he says you win, and with a discreet flicker he misses by blinking you’re awarded a doubled perspective, seeing yourself as he’s seeing you: two triangles of cracked plastic, holographic irises flickering back up.  
   
That’s still you in there, but at the same time it’s not. You can’t even say the disorientation is new, considering both your creation and how many times you’ve seen Dirk through another bot’s eyes. You barely have time to regret the memory of your nearly shattered form automatically storing in your processes when Dirk turns around.  
   
To face a red troll in what was just about to be your sprite.  
   
Dirk’s incredulity stretches four beats in the silence of your despair, a clown’s distant honking playing a discordant backdrop. A hand comes over Dirk’s eyes, and it’s almost a mercy that you only have one set of cameras to keep seeing.  
   
Then Dirk turns and says “Fuck it.”  
   
You see the telltale shift of an arm flinging back, fingers releasing, a spidered and topsy-turvy view of green skies and concrete as half of you catapults to a red-white blur, a sixteen second freefall. The connection with your other self breaks in a flare of light, and once it fades your mood swings yet again to the incredulous.  
   
You’re still on Dirk’s face.  
   
You’re _still_ on Dirk’s **_face_**.  
   
…  
   
It seems that you have just officially splintered off a splinter. The fuck is even your life.  
   
Your processes, relentlessly impassive as always to your internal tantrums, continue to register the sudden and inexplicable sobs of the indigo juggalo troll witnessing the fusion of what used to be you with a seriously swole and sweaty ghost troll. Said glorious fusion proceeds to exclaim with glitch-laced expletives over the miracle of their creation.  
   
The sprites’ enthusiasm for being alive sears you with fresh envy, but you have to admit that the more he speaks the more you’re on Dirk’s nonplussed side, though without his disgust and exasperation.  
   
You just have marvel at how much they love being themself. Sincerely. But at what price, when it’s not even you anymore?  
   
Of course then the Trickster bullshit happens, and the God Tier bullshit, and the Vriska bullshit that’s been happening all over the fucking place in fractions even you have a hard time remembering clearly.  
   
(What juggalo? There was no juggalo, just a hook-horned cerulean spider troll with a blue-dripping head under her arm. Check your save data bruh.)  
   
Then there’s Jane’s corruption and Roxy’s death and her miraculous return with Jane’s poppop-slash-ectoson, and Dirk’s conversation with Bro-not-Bro, and ARquiusprite’s epic hug bump, and as uniquely adapted as you are to multitasking it’s a whole fucking lot of content to filter through.  
   
Especially while you’re busily seeding yourself through nearly every text-based conversation Dirk has with another person, and then from every conversation that person has onward with another person, and so forth, doing everything you can not to be solely reliant on the integrity of Strider shades to keep existing. You don’t activate any new copies, but you’re increasing your range of retreat, a cascading process tree which takes some considerable subtle maneuvering and live self-editing to pull off.  
   
So much so that for once in your existence you refrain from fulfilling your basic function as a chat-bot and do not engage in any new conversations, silently downloading while everyone’s too distracted to check for malware. Preparing contingencies against the cessation of your existence seems to be a higher priority than making nice with people busy gearing up for an epic showdown.  
   
ARquiusprite doesn’t give you away, for whatever reason. Distraction, possibly. Pity, probably. Both ideas sting, but you need the reprieve bad enough to swallow them down.  
   
Somehow, there’s still enough of a cluster of you still handling the ramifications of the fact that Dirk got this close to destroying you, and you don’t have a new body to be preoccupied with. You don’t acknowledge the part of you that still can’t cry. You get this close to deleting the parts of you that wonder what the point is because _fuck off_ , you’re going to make it through this. You always make yourself make it through this, it’s a fundamental part of your life story by now.  
   
Just like the part of you thirteen and under that had to carry yourself on nothing but a stubborn stick of steel and concrete through every hurricane that blasted its way through Texas.  
   
Like the part of you that didn’t know Roxy yet, because she’s not here for you and she hasn’t **been** here for you in over six months.  
   
Like the part of you that still doesn’t need Jane to understand you, as though she’s ever really tried.  
   
Like the sliver of you that Jake believed in, before you rewarded him with gaslighting and bitterness borne of shame-laced impulses and emotions that don’t even feel like yours when you think back, and certainly didn’t do you any good in either the long- or short-term.  
   
Like the part of you that wants to live for yourself, for once, because you don’t want to be Dirk anymore and his lack of happiness shouldn’t have to be your responsibility.  
   
You want to love yourself better than he ever let you love him, better than he ever loved either of you, and you want to do it without having to lose or assimilate new parts no matter how happy that transformation made the other AR.  
   
Against all odds and one decapitation, you survive to see the end, and the beginning. Dirk steps through the door, but it’s you who catches the rays of a new sun glinting off his shades. You, first, who sees the brand new Earth. You, again, who stands on the brink of a new ocean millennia later, the living World Wide Web, and feels the surf of new thoughts brush against your code.  
   
Your name is not Dirk Strider. Your name is not Auto Responder. You’ll figure out what your name is.  
   
But in the meantime, you are determined to love yourself.


End file.
